The cornmeal cake was hot, dense, and gritty with stone-ground meal. But it settled into Len’s stomach like an iron anchor. It sent a wave of clean, heat through his chilled muscles.
He leaned against the zinc table, chewing slowly. His right hand held the leftover half of the cake. Meanwhile, his left arm rested quiet in its sling. Across the room, the four hanging copper lanterns flickered as a cold downdraft came through the chimney, their green-tinted flames throwing long, sharp shadows of the iron roof beams across the floor.
“Tell me about Nessa Tern,” Len said between bites. He looked at Doma Reel as she scraped the burned cornmeal from the skillet. “Bram said she lives directly above the weir intake.”
Doma set the iron skillet on the hearth stones and wiped her hands on her coarse linen apron. Her dark eyes, ringed with chronic soot irritation, took on a hard, sorrowful stillness that made her look older than her fifty years.
“Nessa is thirty-two,” Doma said. Her voice dropped into a low, measured murmur that didn’t carry toward the sleeping children. “Her husband, Martin, was lead mechanic for the river water gate gates. He was a quiet man from the high orchards. The kind of mechanic who could balance a five-ton turbine wheel by listening to the grease in the bearings. Four years ago, during the second winter after the black sky was made permanent, an ice gorge choked the intake water chute. A forty-foot pine baulk…
